Laying Some Plans

Alright, so confession time. I only wrote for thirty minutes last night. It was late, I was tired and I suppose it’s still better than nothing. The project I mentioned I may switch or fold into something else (after a lot of revisions) because it’s so inconsistent with its tone – it just kind of floats from one thing to another. It’s functioning like a horror story one chapter and the next, like an epic fantasy. The foray to another planet (by use of magic, by the way) in the middle of the story certainly doesn’t really help matters.

Interestingly, I actually did develop a universe that would allow just about anything – but was definitely pure urban/epic fantasy, incorporated with just about everything I thought was cool or interesting. But there were cosmological reasons that accounted for everything – why there were dinosaurs running around in American-style urban metropolis, why 18^th century pirates were attack modern day tourists, and why ancient Persia (with magic, mind you) was fighting cowboys from the Old West. In-universe, it made sense, and there was a definite consistency of tone – the genres may blur together, but I knew at least what it was.

But this just goes happily from place to place. And then there’s the characters – there’s quite a few of them, most of them stick around which makes things difficult to balance on top of everything else. It’s kind of like the Frankenstein of novels – a bit taken from this, a bit taken from that without any rhyme or reason. I may return to my other project and do something else with the current one – there’s a lot of things I like about it, to be honest but none of it really gelling together, so to speak. 

Also – it has been a couple of days now and I’m still kind of debating the other project (which I was taking a break from, see blog entries from earlier) – and I think that the characters and the general premise – which involved dropping some poor guy from our world into an exotic fantasy land that had lots of parallels with Ancient Egypt – doesn’t work with the setting. The characters need to come from entirely within the universe. 

My reasoning for this is the heavy focus on the gods of the setting and, really, the idea of these inter-dimensional travelers kind of undermine them. I have a few ideas for tackling it, but we’ll see.

I think I may work on that urban fantasy I mentioned earlier – that had a lot of interesting ideas in it. I was thinking for a while about making it a comic, because owing to how the plot worked would have worked well in that particular medium, but I ultimately decided against it, largely because I don’t have the drawing chops necessary to make that happen and I don’t know anyone who has the time or inclination to draw a comic and keep it going on a regular basis. 

So, novel it is. It’ll still work, though. I need to review my notes (I have a lot of notes for this story, but not very much in the way of actual drafts.). It is a multi-book epic, in fact – most of my projects are.  So…yeah, we’ll see where it goes and I’ll report more about it tomorrow. There’s so many ideas and projects I want to work on.

That’s all for now, I’ve said everything that I think needs to be said and if I keep going, I’m going to repeat myself. Thanks for reading.